Daddy, We Hardly Knew You

by Germaine Greer

  On 2 June the following ‘notes’ appeared in Hawklet: ‘Ted Russell’s Black and White Co is doing well, crowded houses about six times a week being the rule. Ted Anderson is very popular and witty. Dorothy Dane is a very good soprano and harmoniser. Rosa Sinclair is a fine little actress, a good ballad singer, and does some clever footwork. She is a great favourite among the male section of the audience. Ted Russell’s parody singing is good, and his yodelling a specialty. Darvell Thomas is, undoubtedly, a very good tenor, and knows how to act. He is leaving Launceston this week with Miss Dorothy Dane who will be his partner from now on for a fair time. The Fletcher Sisters are a very good hit, and Lily’s strong voice gets a lot of applause, and “Chick’s” voice seems to harmonise well.’ (At this point the style of the notes collapses into bathetic uncertainty.) ‘Darvel Thomas is second to none, so far, who have visited Launceston in revue work. Rhodesbury and Ralph are clever artists, and very good at jokes, some of them being very witty. Rhodesbury possesses a very good voice, and I think will hold it for a few years yet.’ The ‘notes’ are signed S.E. Greeney.

  There was no S.E. Greeney in Launceston in June 1921. Hawklet always had difficulty in rendering names, even the names of the performers it was supposed to puff. The likeliest candidate for authorship of the ‘notes’, which are badly enough written in truth, is Eric Greeney. A letter like this from a member of the audience is both a puff and a timely reminder to those booking new shows. Eric was probably prompted by a member of the company, aware by now that the Tasmanian career of the Black and White Costume Comedy Company was about to come to an end. The prompter, one would think, given her prominence in the account given of the performances, was probably Rosa Sinclair.

  In writing to Hawklet, Eric Greeney was acting as a ‘gee-man’ or ‘Mickey Finn’, whose job is to stir up the sluggish crowd. Or perhaps he had the less demanding job of a hampster, who has merely to stand in front of the crowd registering enthusiasm for the spruiker’s suggestions and lead the way to the ticket office. It was a good induction for a street-smart young man who was to rise to the top in the new industry of advertising.

  The day after S.E. Greeney’s contribution appeared in Hawklet, the Black and Whites moved out of the Academy Theatre. The names of Ted Russell and Rhodesbury and Ralph appear amongst the passengers in the first saloon on the SS Nairana when she left for Melbourne on 13 June but it seems that they fitted in a short tour of the industrial towns on the west coast of Tasmania and actually left on 20 June. Part of the company went on to perform at Bendigo and Ballarat, then Ted Russell and his wife went to Wonthaggi with a company called ‘Dinkum Diggers’ run by Val Lee, that had played successfully in the north-eastern district of Victoria, before leaving to take up an engagement to tour in South Africa.

  If Eric Greeney left Tasmania ‘with the Black and Whites’ he must have crossed Bass Strait in the third week of June, more than two months before his seventeenth birthday. If he stayed with Rosa Sinclair he would have been in the vicinity of the Kensington Town Hall in September, where she was appearing for impresario Frank Irons, and Sandringham Town Hall in December, for Will Hill, then at the Temperance Hall. On Tuesday, 20 December, she was married to the ‘well-known’ ventriloquist Eric Valentine, who was not the man who later married my mother as ‘Eric Reginald Greer’.

  Emma must have protested when Eric announced his intention of leaving, but she never forced a restless child to remain with her against its will. As Eric’s adoption was never official she had no way of preventing what must have seemed to her a catastrophe. She had no legal right of control over him at all. Her only recourse would have been to have turned him over to the police as uncontrollable, an outcome which would have been disastrous for her and the rest of her large family. Emma never saw Eric again. He wrote once or twice and then—nothing. He put Emma, and Robert, and Ernie and Eli and Thurza and Clifford and Geraldine and Dulcie out of his mind forever.

  Emma knew, none better, what a harsh and unforgiving world it is, and she probably had a shrewd idea that Eric’s talent was not great. She never knew what became of him, and she was not a woman to forget. Try as I might I cannot forgive my father this cruelty, banal and commonplace as it is, compounded of indifference and lack of imagination. Whatever confidence, charm, elegance or plausibility he had, she had made possible for him. Perhaps he realised it, and could not bring himself to write and tell her that he was not a great star of stage and screen, but a well-dressed battler living by his wits.

  The Gauntlet

  ‘I mean every once in a while I’m just amazed when I catch a glimpse of who I really am. Just a little flash like the gesture of my hand in a conversation and WHAM there’s my old man. Right there, living inside me like a worm in the wood. And I ask myself, “Where have I been all this time? Why was I blind? Sleeping. Just the same as being asleep. We’re all asleep. Being awake is too hard.”’

  SAM SHEPARD, ‘SLEEPING AT THE WHEEL’

  The yellow-bound proof copy of a new book on the media superstars of the seventies’ feminist movement cracked open at a chapter called ‘Sitting on a Fortune’. I read the slip-slop slapdash synopsis of my parents’ life with deepening horror. I had nobody but myself to blame for the farrago of errors that skipped about the page. Germaine’s father ‘was already housed in army barracks’ when she was born. No, he wasn’t. He was sitting in a flat in St Kilda with Wally Worboys.

  ‘In the years to come—“for the duration” as it was called—Peggy, like so many wives of young servicemen, would wait. She would not go back to her work as a model. Instead she would play the role of a war wife, entertaining the American soldiers who stopped off in the charmed middle class oasis of Melbourne en route to the battlefields of the Pacific.’

  ‘Can I have talked such rubbish to this woman?’ I asked myself miserably. I would have told her that my mother was tall, red-haired, scarlet-mouthed and very striking, but surely I couldn’t have made her sound like Mamie Stover. Poor Mother, her modelling career was one photograph. She never worked after she married her dream man, with the elegant office in the city that Joyce Bull ran for him while he played man about town. There was never any question of her going back to work. Wartime austerity and millinery hardly went together. She did what she has always done, made do with the tiny allowance she got as an officer’s wife, and went to the beach. And in any case Reg Greer didn’t go for his board until December 1941. Mother used to tell a story about how Daddy rang to say he was embarking, and she fainted by the telephone. When she came to, there was I, looking down at her anxiously. ‘I have something to live for,’ she told herself and bravely soldiered on, a woman without a man, etc., etc.

  If I imagine that scene I see myself as a tall, sallow three-year-old, with a censorious look. ‘What are you doing on the floor, Mother?’ I don’t remember seeing my mother drop the telephone and fall as one dead, or screaming with terror until she came to. The war and fatherlessness are the first things I can remember.

  The parody of my own inaccurate memories and the scenario I erected upon them continued; my own account of meeting Daddy when he was demobbed appeared in a new and fanciful garb.

  ‘After a while they stepped back from the crowd to make a more careful study….’ Oh no, we didn’t. The station platform was emptying, as wives and mothers scooped up their trembling men and took them home. We wandered up and down until there were only a few men left, and one of them, grey-faced, drawn and old, was Reg Greer.

  ‘In fact Reg Greer, his teeth lost to starvation, was returning home after a two-year stay in a hospital. He was suffering, Germaine would learn much later, from severe anxiety neurosis, the aftermath of battle shock and wartime deprivations in Egypt and Malta.’

  No wonder my mother used to click her tongue and brush off my jeremiads about my father. I read on in torment, battle shock indeed. Two years in hospital. God, how could I ever have invented such stuff? Even the teeth detail was wrong.

  The real cause of my father�
��s losing his teeth was nothing to do with the war. On the report of his first medical examination in 1941 I found the initials PUD: Prosthetic upper denture. He lost his upper teeth before he went before the interview board, probably before the war. Nevertheless I’m sure we were told, as part of the endless nagging to brush our teeth, that Daddy’s teeth had fallen out when his gums receded because of poor diet in Malta. Joyce Bull had said in her letter: ‘He must have been very distressed about the loss of his teeth. He was very proud of his teeth.’ The foster-sisters said to me in Tasmania, ‘He had beautiful teeth.’ I never met those beautiful teeth, but I found a photograph of them in Newspaper News dated 1936, which showed the gums already receding.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mother. ‘That was because of smoking a pipe. In Western Australia, he smoked a pipe and it ruined his teeth, pulled them all out of alignment. Champing on a pipe.’

  ‘I never saw him with a pipe.’

  ‘Well, no. He gave it up then. Just smoked cigarettes.’

  The more I think about it, the more I think Eric Greeney began to smoke a pipe in order to make himself seem older. The tale of the teeth is doubtless trivial, but it provides a very good example of the way myths grow in families. The photograph of my father that used to stand on the overmantel, that was all I knew of him until the day we met him at Spencer Street, has disappeared, but now that I think of it, I’m fairly sure that it showed him with false teeth. Nevertheless we all believed the tale of his losing his teeth in the war. He looked toothless that day on the station platform because his gums would have shrunk badly as a consequence of his anorexia. His denture probably did not fit any more and had to be built up, and out of that we made a legend of the teeth as war casualties.

  ‘Do you know, Ann,’ I said, sitting on the stool at Ann’s kitchen counter in Fitzroy, ‘I reckon my father dyed his hair. Not just when his hair faded, when he was old, but all his life. All his life as Reg Greer, I mean.’

  ‘You mustn’t start doubting everything about the poor man,’ said Ann, laughing.

  But I know, rather, I believe, that Eric Greeney’s hair was the same mid-mousy-brown that mine is. Daddy had fair eyebrows and a fair nicotine-stained moustache. He darkened his top hair to age himself, and to give his head a sleeker profile. My hairline is identical to his, and I know his top hair would have been curly and fly-away, but his barber darkened it and straightened it, to strengthen the Basil Rathbone likeness. It was well and subtly done, but it was done. If Reg Greer had met Eli Greeney in the street, Eli might not have known him with his dark hair and his new teeth for his brother, Eric.

  The book splashed on through a mire of errors about me. About those I could feel amused, but the inflation of my own mistakes about Reg Greer, the ‘high-ranking’ intelligence officer, had the effect of pushing him still further away. All I had was a heap of props, smart clothes, dyed hair, false teeth, and a script full of lying clichés, most of them embellishments of my own fantasies.

  ‘Your father fantasised a lot,’ Joyce said. Here was the evidence that I fantasised just as much. I made a myth about my father and I published it. How the poor man must have shuddered whenever, if ever, he read accounts of my childhood based on interviews with me. He of course never spoke a word, never said, ‘She doesn’t know what she is talking about.’ He was gagged and bound by his own lies. But try as I might I cannot feel sorry for him.

  What would I have done if he called me in one day and began, ‘There are some things I think you ought to know about your background….’

  ‘Fire away, Papa.’

  ‘Well to begin with my name’s not Greer, and I don’t know what it should be….’

  If my father had told me as much of the truth as he knew, and enjoined me to silence, I would have kept my word. Yet he was probably right in not burdening me this way; I’m sure I should have lacked all confidence and conviction if I had learned the truth in adolescence. Now that knowing the truth cannot hurt anyone, I had to impart it to my family.

  First I went to my sister, because I feel closest to her. We didn’t begin the story until we had loaded the picnic hamper and the thermos into her ’cuda boat and chugged around the corner of the red cliff into a sparkling bay. Feeding porpoises tumbled by us, which I thought a good omen, for the dolphin is a figure of love. Cormorants watched sleepily from the fringed piles. Jane taught me how to tell the sex of the commonest gulls. The water was like black opal and the sky trailed far off a fine scarf of cloud, signifying the first currents of high cold air, and summer’s end.

  Jane has married into a big Catholic dynasty. The early years of adjustment were hard for her, but she won through and became a central pivot of the family. She brought no money and no connections with her, except for the one, rather onerous, with me, but she did bring a warm heart, loyalty, perseverance, capability and creativity. She has my father’s genius for making and keeping friends, which is more to be envied than her beautiful houses, her BMW and her boat.

  ‘Is it bad?’ she asked me as we pushed the boat off the jetty.

  ‘Pretty bad. But it could be worse.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked quickly.

  ‘I don’t think he was a bigamist. Or a jailbird.’

  When the hamper was opened and the gulls were busy stealing everything out of it, I told her the whole story. At first her face stiffened with embarrassment. She looked past me to the shore on the other side of the heads, her dark eyes reflecting the ocean rollers’ blue-grey. If she had turned to me and told me coldly that I had no call to be disturbing our father’s repose, I should not have known what to answer. I need not have worried; she took Emma Greeney to her heart at once. As I described Eric Greeney to her, she said more than once, ‘Just like Peter Marcus’, her elder son. In the end she was glad to have her heredity, rather than the implausible facade we had always lived with.

  ‘You always knew, you know,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember if he told me or you told me, but someone told me that there’d been a name change. It’s a good story, isn’t it? I think it’s really interesting. Poor Daddy. Mum’ll be dark. She was sure you were way off-beam.’

  That night she told her two boys and her husband, and they liked the story too.

  If my sister liked the story, my brother Barry adored it. He had such physical intimacy with our father that he had felt no need to idealise him. He knew all his foibles and had forgiven him for them long ago. He put a tape-recorder on the table as I began my story. ‘I want to make sure that I get it right,’ he said.

  All his working life, my brother, who is a primary school teacher, has been involved with poor children. He was actually pleased to discover that our father was one of the poorest of poor children. He understood Emma’s noisy household and its small inhabitants immediately. It was easy to demonstrate to him how extraordinary Emma’s understanding of adolescent children was for her time, and what kind of rough and tumble logic she used to build the children’s self-esteem.

  ‘She made it possible for them to escape,’ he said. ‘That was her greatest achievement.’

  To Barry, who is a committed socialist and gut democrat, the proof that children are not limited by their heredity was manifest at every stage of the story. He brushed aside my strictures about Reg Greer’s treatment of Emma.

  ‘He did what he had to do,’ he said. ‘He knew what he could handle, and what he couldn’t.’

  ‘D’you reckon he loved her?’

  ‘I reckon. But it was like it was with all of us. He couldn’t show it. Or he’d have gone to pieces.’

  ‘You think he felt too much, rather than too little.’

  ‘I think so. After all that he made a stable family; he brought us all up well. Three out of three’s not bad going.’

  ‘But, if he knew about poverty and the struggles of the poor for any kind of a decent life, why was he so stupidly right-wing? It’s funny really; none of his kids would ever vote Liberal and poor Daddy never voted anything else. Perhaps that’s it.
Perhaps he felt that socialism institutionalises poverty so that you can’t escape from it. He wanted to live in a world where he didn’t have to think about poverty any more, didn’t have to acknowledge that it existed. But that’d mean that he was living in a dream.’

  ‘Well, he was. Maybe he couldn’t confront reality himself, because the early struggle knocked him about too much. But he gave us the security and confidence to get involved.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Barry. I think his version is typical of the lie of history that concentrates on élites; the truth about Reg Greer is a classic example of herstory, puncturing the ideology.’

  Hugh and Alice, my nephew and niece, had listened to the whole story and wisely refrained from intervening. There would be time tomorrow and afterwards to go over the tape and explain the hard bits, about fostering and adoption, about illegitimacy and the seduction of servant-girls. Alice climbed onto Barry’s knee for a cuddle before she went to bed. My brother looked quite beautiful, sitting with his daughter’s arms garlanded around his neck, accepting her closeness without a hint of our father’s self-consciousness. She fitted herself into the side of his body like a limpet, and would have gone to sleep right where she was, if her brother had not summoned her to bed.

  I had to tell our mother next.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked over the telephone.

  ‘In Tasmania, Mother.’

  ‘What were you doing in Tasmania?’

  ‘Researching Daddy’s life, Mother.’